Robert Elsmere by Mrs. Humphry Ward (best classic literature txt) 📕

some charitable occupation for herself.

After her letter to him, Catherine had an interview with the Vicar at his home. She was puzzled by the start and sudden pause for recollection with which he received her name, the tone of compassion which crept into his talk with her, the pitying look and grasp of the hand with which he dismissed her. Then, as she walked home, it flashed upon her that she had seen a copy, some weeks old, of the _Record_ lying on the good man's table, the very copy which contained Robert's name among the list of men who during the last ten years had thrown up the Anglican ministry. The delicate face flushed miserably from brow to chin. Pitied for being Robert's wife! Oh, monstrous!--incredible!

Meanwhile Robert, man-like, in spite of all the griefs and sorenesses of the position, had immeasurably the best of it. In the first place such incessant activity of mind as his is in itself both tonic and narcotic. It was constantly generating in him fresh purposes and hopes, constantly deadening regret, and pushing the old things out of sight. He was full of many projects literary and social, but they were all in truth the fruits of one long experimental process, the passionate attempt of the reason to justify to itself the God in whom the heart believed. Abstract thought, as Mr. Grey saw, had had comparatively little to do with Elsmere's relinquishment of the Church of England. But as soon as the Christian bases of faith were overthrown, that faith had naturally to find for itself other supports and attachments. For faith itself--in God and a spiritual order--had been so wrought into the nature by years of reverent and adoring living, that nothing could destroy it. With Elsmere as with all men of religious temperament, belief in Christianity and faith in God had not at the outset been a matter of reasoning at all, but of sympathy, feeling, association, daily experience. Then the intellect had broken in, and destroyed or transformed the belief in Christianity. But after the crash, _faith_ emerged as strong as ever, only craving and eager to make a fresh peace, a fresh compact with the reason.

Elsmere had heard Grey say long ago in one of the few moments of real intimacy he had enjoyed with him at Oxford, 'My interest in philosophy springs solely from the chance it offers me of knowing something more of God!' Driven by the same thirst he too threw himself into the same quest, pushing his way laboriously through the philosophical border-lands of science, through the ethical speculation of the day, through the history of man's moral and religious past. And while on the one hand the intellect was able to contribute an ever stronger support to the faith which was the man; on the other, the sphere in him of a patient ignorance, which abstains from all attempts at knowing what man cannot know, and substitutes trust for either knowledge or despair, was perpetually widening. 'I take my stand on conscience and the moral life!' was the upshot of it all. 'In them I find my God! As for all these various problems, ethical and scientific, which you press upon me, my pessimist friend, I, too, am bewildered; I, too, have no explanations to offer. But I trust and wait. In spite of them--beyond them--I have abundantly enough for faith--for hope--for action!'

We may quote a passage or two from some letters of his written at this time to that young Armitstead who had taken his place at Murewell and was still there till Mowbray Elsmere should appoint a new man. Armitstead had been a college friend of Elsmere's. He was a High Churchman of a singularly gentle and delicate type, and the manner in which he had received Elsmere's story on the day of his arrival at Murewell had permanently endeared him to the teller of it. At the same time the defection from Christianity of a man who at Oxford had been to him the object of much hero-worship, and, since Oxford, an example of pastoral efficiency, had painfully affected young Armitstead, and he began a correspondence with Robert which was in many ways a relief to both. In Switzerland and Italy, when his wife's gentle inexorable silence became too oppressive to him, Robert would pour himself out in letters to Armitstead, and the correspondence did not altogether cease with his return to London. To the Squire during the same period Elsmere also wrote frequently, but rarely or never on religious matters.

On one occasion Armitstead had been pressing the favorite Christian dilemma--Christianity or nothing. Inside Christianity, light and certainly; outside it, chaos. 'If it were not for the Gospels and the Church I should be a Positivist to-morrow. Your Theism is a mere arbitrary hypothesis, at the mercy of any rival philosophical theory. How, regarding our position as precarious, you should come to regard your own as stable, is to me incomprehensible!'

'What I conceive to be the vital difference between Theism and Christianity,' wrote Elsmere in reply, 'is that as an explanation of things _Theism can never be disproved_. At the worst it must always remain in the position of an alternative hypothesis, which the hostile man of science cannot destroy, though he is under no obligation to adopt it. Broadly speaking, it is not the facts which are in dispute, but the inference to be drawn from them.'

'Now, considering the enormous complication of the facts, the Theistic inference will, to put it at the lowest, always have its place, always command respect. The man of science may not adopt it, but by no advance of science that I, at any rate, can foresee, can it be driven out of the field.

'Christianity is in a totally different position. Its grounds are not philosophical but literary and historical. It rests not upon all fact, but upon a special group of facts. It is and will always remain, a great literary and historical problem, a _question of documents and testimony_. Hence, the Christian explanation is vulnerable in a way in which the Theistic explanation can never be vulnerable. The contention at any rate, of persons in my position is: That to the man who has had the special training required, and in whom this training has not been neutralized by any overwhelming bias of temperament, it can be as clearly demonstrated that the miraculous Christian story rests on a tissue of mistake, as it can be demonstrated that the Isidorian Decretals were a forgery, or the correspondence of Paul and Seneca a pious fraud, or that the mediaeval belief in witchcraft was the product of physical ignorance and superstition.'

'You say,' he wrote again, in another connection, to Armitstead from Milan, 'you say you think my later letters have been far too aggressive and positive. I, too, am astonished at myself. I do not know my own mood, it is so clear, so sharp, so combative. Is it the spectacle of Italy, I wonder--of a country practically without religion--the spectacle in fact of Latin Europe as a whole, ad the practical Atheism in which it is engulfed? My dear friend, the problem of the world at this moment is--_how to find a religion?_--some great conception which shall be once more capable, as the old was capable, of welding societies, and keeping man's brutish elements in check. Surely Christianity of the traditional sort is failing everywhere--less obviously with us, and in Teutonic Europe generally, but notoriously, in all the Catholic countries. We talk complacently of the decline of Buddhism. But what have we to say of the decline of Christianity? And yet this last is infinitely more striking and more tragic, inasmuch as it affects a more important section of mankind. I, at any rate, am not one of those who would seek to minimize the results of this decline for human life, nor can I bring myself to believe that Positivism or "evolutional morality" will ever satisfy the race.'

'In the period of social struggle which undeniably lies before us, both in the old and the new world, are we then to witness a war of classes, unsoftened by the ideal hopes, the ideal law, of faith? It looks like it. What does the artisan class, what does the town democracy throughout Europe, care any longer for Christian checks or Christian sanctions as they have been taught to understand them? Superstition, in certain parts of rural Europe, there is in plenty, but wherever you get intelligence and therefore movement, you got at once either indifference to, or a passionate break with Christianity. And consider what it means, what it will mean, this Atheism of the great democracies which are to be our masters! The world has never seen anything like it; such spiritual anarchy and poverty combined with such material power and resource. Every society--Christian and non-Christian--has always till now had its ideal, of greater or less ethical value, its appeal to something beyond man. Has Christianity brought us to this: that the Christian nations are to be the first in the world's history to try the experiment of a life without faith--that life which you and I, at any rate, are agreed in thinking a life worthy only of the brute?

'Oh forgive me! These things must hurt you--they would have hurt me in old days--but they burn within me, and you bid me speak out. What if it be God himself who is driving His painful lesson home to me, to you, to the world? What does it mean: this gradual growth of what we call infidelity, of criticism and science on the one hand, this gradual death of the old traditions on the other? _Sin_, you answer, _the enmity of the human mind against God, the momentary triumph of Satan_. And so you acquiesce, heavy-hearted, in God's present defeat, looking for vengeance and requital here-after. I am not so ready to believe in man's capacity to rebel against his Maker! Where you see ruin and sin, I see the urgent process of Divine education, God's steady ineluctable command "to put away childish things," the pressure of His spirit on ours toward new ways of worship and new forms of love!'

And after a while it was with these 'new ways of worship and now forms of love' that the mind began to be perpetually occupied. The break with the old things was no sooner complete, than the eager soul, incapable then, as always, of resting in negation or oppositions pressed passionately forward to a new synthesis, not only speculative, but practical. Before it rose perpetually the haunting vision of another palace of faith--another church or company of the faithful, which was to become the shelter of human aspiration amid the desolation and anarchy caused by the crashing of the old! How many men and women must have gone through the same strait as itself--how many must be watching with it through the darkness for the rising of a new City of God!

One afternoon, close upon Christmas, he found himself in Parliament Square, on his way toward Westminster Bridge and the Embankment. The beauty of a sunset sky behind the Abbey arrested him, and he stood leaning over the railings beside the Peel statue to look.

The day before, he had passed the same spot with a German friend. His companion--a man of influence and mark in his own country, who had been brought up however in England and knew it well--had stopped before the Abbey and had said to him with emphasis: 'I never find myself in this particular spot of London without a sense of emotion and reverence. Other people feel that in treading the Forum of Rome they are at the centre of human things. I am more thrilled by Westminster than Rome; your venerable